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Chicago Matchmaker

Our professional matchmakers have been matchmaking Chicagoland singles looking for love since 2009. If you live in places like Near North Side, Near South Side, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Andersonville, Kenwood, Hyde Park, or Rogers Park its hard to meet your match while you’re just out and about.

Chicago singles beyond the city in places like Bridgeview, Lisle, Northlake, Summit, Midlothian, Matteson, Worth, West Chicago, Crete and Mokena have hired our professional matchmakers and personal coaches to meet the man or woman of their dreams.

Although it might be hard to sometimes to make it out and about in the Windy City there’s no shortage of outstanding singles surrounding you. Online and mobile dating often do more harm than good because they tend to be flooded with bad actors. We prove identity and age, run criminal background checks and personally interview people we represent face-to-face to ensure our clients have a safe and worry-free experience.

Complete our Get Started form or call us toll free at (800) 734-9230 for matchmaking services in Chicago.

Get Started

Dating can be tough. With guaranteed matches and date feedback we do whatever it takes to guide you into a relationship.

Complete our Get Started form and you will be contacted to discuss your matchmaking and coaching options.

How It Works

Online dating is difficult. We guarantee matches that meet your criteria. Your personal coach and dedicated matchmakers will communicate feedback, troubleshoot issues and guide you into a relationship.

About Us

Joann Ward has been matchmaking for over 30 years. Her son, Steve Ward followed in her footsteps in 2003. They became internationally known matchmakers as Hosts and Executive Producers of VH1 Tough Love.

While Tinder and Bumble Battle it Out, Facebook Decides to Cripple Them Both and Matchmakers Rejoice

Wednesday, May 02, 2018

If you haven’t heard, Match and Bumble are suing each other in what can be described as nothing less than a hostile takeover by the larger, more dominant incumbent. In order to understand what brought these two to blows you have to first understand the machinations of Match.

The Past

I’ll spare you the storied history of Match.com and how it emerged from the early 90’s dot com era. Founded by Gary Kremen in 1995, acquired by Cendant in 1998, then by IAC in 1999. While chaired by the famed Barry Diller, Match.com became the most popular dating website in the world far surpassing the likes of their closest competitors at the time such as eHarmomy and Spark Networks (ChristianMingle, JDate, etc.) which are now just shadows of the massive companies they used to be.

eHarmony is a privately held company but I would venture to say it is 1/5th of the size it was at its peak. Spark Networks merged with a much larger international company that kept the Spark business in tact simply to maintain a US stock listing. Their core assets though are also generating much less revenues than they did before the mobile internet consumption tipping point in the Fall of 2016.

Match is a publicly owned conglomerate still majority owned by the comparably sized conglomerate, IAC. The former has a market capitalization of $10B and the latter has one of $11B. Match Group Inc is now a family of dating sites and mobile apps consisting of the most popular dating products on Earth, which still includes the mother of all dating sites Match.com, OurTime which it created, Tinder which it incubated, OkCupid which it acquired for $50MM, PlentyofFish which it acquired for $575MM cash and more. For those of you not abreast on the latest and greatest dating applications today, in the US, Tinder is the number one grossing Lifestyle App in both the App Store and Google Play. Bumble is number two.

In the last 30 days, according to Apptopia, there have been 141MM DAUs on Tinder. To put that into perspective, Snap reported today that they are averaging 191MM DAUs, and as of this morning their market cap is $14.26B.

Apptopia says Bumble has 10MM DAUs. Tinder is 14xs as large as Bumble (based on DAUs) and they’re also killing Bumble on average revenue per user (ARPU). On iOS, Tinder earns $4/user while Bumble’s ARPU is $2.70/user. On Android Tinder earns $1/user while Bumble earns $0.90/user.

But Match Group Inc has always had a take-no-prisoners approach to growth, and they clearly don’t mind paying big to acquire the competition as evidenced by their $575MM acquisition of PlentyofFish. You would think that Bumble would have welcomed a billion dollar plus acquisition price, which was just reported as recently as of November 2017. And this was after they had already turned down a $450MM offer.

However, if you knew the origin story of Bumble, you might appreciate why they are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their foothold and independence in the space (even though they are majority owned by a Russian born billionaire). In short, without (Bumble Founder) Whitney Wolfe, the unofficial female co-founder of Tinder who was dating Justin Mateen, the official co-founder at the time, Tinder might never have taken taken off. This is thanks to her well-documented “collegian” recruitment strategy of going to chapters of her national sorority to get women to download Tinder, then visiting the nearby fraternities to attract the men. And Voila! You have the most popular dating app on Earth. Perhaps without this tumultuous breakup that resulted in a highly publicized sexual harassment lawsuit, Bumble might not have ever been born.

Fast forward a few years, both Tinder and Bumble are thriving and Tinder is fully acquired by Match, which had recently spun off from IAC to become it’s own publicly traded company.

The Present

Now that Bumble and Tinder are suing each other for patent infringement, trade secret violations and a host of other claims, it seems fortuitous that Facebook decides to Amazon them. Just yesterday Mark Zuckerberg revealed the latest product to be born out of Facebook. Dating on Facebook.

Surely Facebook didn’t decide to venture into dating because the number one and two lifestyle apps are fighting it out in court.

Facebook wants to do to dating what they’ve done to messaging. Corner a market that could be much bigger than it is today as a way to attract younger people who aren’t otherwise inclined to use their core product.

But what Facebook is discounting, is the painful, expensive and sometimes tragic consequences of facilitating dates online.

In a lawsuit brought by a Jane Doe who was the victim of a serial rapist that she saw on Match.com for years before she agreed to their first and only date that resulted in her violent assault, it was discovered that in a two year span from 2007 to 2009 there were more than 1,200 accounts of violence or sexual assault reported to Match.com.

In court, Jane Doe’s attorney detailed some of the 1,200 complaints by Match.com users: 143 users reported a rape; 48 reported an attempted rape; 22 said they had “first-hand knowledge of a past sexual assault”; 71 “reported third-hand knowledge of a past assault”; 12 said they feared they were in danger of being raped; 47 reported they had been drugged; 340 reported they were victims of “unspecified acts of violence, and 600 reported ‘straight violence,’” the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reported.

The use of dating apps has skyrocketed since then. And by now the problem has swelled tremendously. But it doesn’t end there. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), Romance Scams and Confidence Fraud “result in the highest amount of financial losses to victims when compared to other online crimes.”

In 2016, almost 15,000 complaints categorized as romance scams or confidence fraud were reported to IC3 (nearly 2,500 more than the previous year), and the losses associated with those complaints exceeded $230 million.

Extremely high prevalence of violent crimes and financial crimes might seem like a deterrent enough to keep Facebook out of the dating space. But now there are warnings from local governments and health departments the world over about a striking correlation between the rapid rise in use of dating apps and an equally rapid rise in STD rates.

The Future

Despite the fact that online dating and mobile dating apps are a feeding frenzy for bad actors, it also happens to be responsible for millions of success stories. But while there are now countless singles online looking for love, there are also more bad actors than ever before. And not all bad actors are violent criminals, financial fraudsters or scam artists. Many of them are just unhappily married philanderers.

Research by GlobalWebIndex found that 42 percent of people using Tinder are already in relationships---and many of them are men. Clearly the more popular anything becomes, the more likely there will be bad actors flocking to it causing problems for everyone up and down the value chain. As companies like Facebook, IAC, Match and others try capitalizing on the masses, dating industry operators will continue to be able to offer niche products and services to give individuals safety, security and a competitive edge.

With nearly half of Tinder users not even single, more violent and financials crimes than ever originating from dating apps, and STDs roaring back with a vengeance, it’s no wonder that Master Matchmakers® is more popular than ever. Any professional matchmaker worth half a salt will be rejoicing over the news that Facebook is moving into online dating.